


Complicated

by Mireille



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-09
Updated: 2005-07-09
Packaged: 2019-03-10 21:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Wesley's leave of absence after "Lineage."





	Complicated

Even now, he wasn't certain why he was sorry. 

He'd shot his father, and even now, Wesley wasn't quite sure if he was sorry that he did it, or that it had only been the cyborg. He'd been a bit more certain before he'd rung his parents, but after hearing his father berate him--and perhaps he should have been able to tell the difference; the real thing was even more coldly dismissive than the imitation--he thought he might have stopped caring.

There was only one light on in his flat; just enough for him to read, if he'd been doing more than looking vacantly down at the page. He'd left the stereo silent tonight; the sound of gunfire in his head was too loud for him to listen to anything else, anyway. 

Wesley turned the page, even though he hadn't taken in any of the words on the previous one. Letting himself be talked into taking this leave from work had been a mistake. In theory, it had sounded quite reasonable, but in practice, it was far less so. He needed to be working. He needed to be doing something productive. He needed to be proving himself, he thought, and wished he hadn't. It reminded him far too much of the visit his "father" had made to Wolfram & Hart. 

At least there weren't any vampires here to treat him to tales of patricide. Or--if Spike could be believed--rather disturbing matricide. They meant well--he was certain Angel did, anyway, and it was just within the realm of possibility that Spike had--but it hadn't helped. In Spike's case, it had given him an unsettling distraction for a few minutes, but in the long term, nothing had changed. 

Nothing was going to help, at least not until he could be absolutely certain that he didn't wish that it really had been his father lying dead on the roof. He didn't know that he'd ever be certain of that. 

Wesley looked up at the sound of someone knocking at his front door. Fred, possibly. She'd rung a few times yesterday morning, but he'd let the machine pick up, and she'd stopped trying. Perhaps she was trying again. 

"Wes? I know you're in there. It's me. Angel."

That actually was a bit of a surprise. Things had been strained between him and Angel for so long that Wesley could hardly remember how they got that way. Lilah, he supposed. He didn't like to dwell on it; it served no purpose. 

Then again, the things Angel had said the other night, when they'd come down from the roof, made him think that perhaps Angel regretted the strain as much as Wesley himself did. 

"Wes," Angel called again, "you know I can break the door down." There was a pause. "Okay, I can't actually _come in_ , but you still won't have a door." 

Setting his book aside, Wesley got up and went to the door, opening it just as Angel raised his hand to knock again. "Come in, then," he said quietly. 

"Thanks." Angel looked around the apartment on his way over to the couch. "This is a nice place."

Wesley nodded his thanks, though he'd paid someone to furnish it; he'd had far too much work to do. He returned to his seat, though he left his book on the table. "Did you want something?"

"Just wondering how you were." 

"I'll be back at the office tomorrow."

"Like hell you will," Angel said, and Wesley winced. Perhaps he'd been wrong about what Angel had said the other night. Perhaps, with time to think about it, he'd realized the whole near-disaster had been Wesley's fault to begin with. "I told you to take at least a week off, and I mean it. You deserve it."

"I'd rather be at work."

"No, you wouldn't. You should be glad you weren't there."

"What happened?" he asked, in spite of himself. 

"Spike happened." Angel shrugged. "Something came in the mail for him, and suddenly he was all… corporeal again. And then all hell broke loose." 

"Figuratively or literally?"

"A little of both." 

"And Spike has a body." 

"Yeah."

There were dozens of questions Wesley would have liked the answers to, but he was just too tired to ask them. They could wait until tomorrow, when, no matter what Angel said, he was coming in to the office. He rubbed his eyes, trying to stifle a yawn. 

He didn't stifle it well enough for vampire senses. "I'm keeping you awake," Angel said. 

And that was a perfect way to get rid of Angel, to get back to the solitude he wanted. "I wasn't going to bed," he said, instead.

"Maybe you should."

"I'm all right," he said, and when had it become _quite_ so easy to lie? When had it stopped even giving him a moment's pause? Granted, this was a relatively trivial matter, but he thought he could still remember a time when even that would have given him a twinge of conscience. 

"I just meant--"

"I don't want to talk about it any more, Angel. Any of it," he added, expecting Angel to get up and leave. 

He didn't. "Okay," he said, settling back against the couch cushions--wincing a little, and Wesley wasn't going to ask him how he'd hurt himself, because that was probably something else he was too tired to think about right now. 

He was too tired to think about anything. Anything, that was, except the way he'd pulled his gun and shot his father, the gunshots echoing in the night. And it would have been the right thing to do, because his father was going to kill Fred and enslave Angel, and he couldn't let that happen, any of it. 

It had been the right thing to do. He knew that. His father always seemed to have the confidence born of knowing he was right--why couldn't Wesley have the same thing? Instead, Wesley had guilt, though possibly only at how easy the whole thing had been, and he had a vampire sitting on the other end of his couch, doing his best to not bother Wesley. 

Vampires really were rather good at being unobtrusive if they wanted to be. Angel sat very still--actually, that might have just been Angel, because Wesley couldn't imagine Spike ever sitting that quietly.

At least he wasn't talking about how he'd killed his entire family, Wesley thought, and didn't think about how grateful he was for the company. He couldn't keep his mind blank; that wasn't a skill he'd ever mastered. But he could think about how tired he was, and what Angel was doing here--why he was willing to sit here silently, as though trying to fade into the furniture--and not about anything of significance. 

As though Angel would ever fade into the woodwork to Wesley's eyes. As though he ever could. It had been the immediate threat to Fred's life that had provoked him into action, but what had been done to Angel had sickened him, had made him determined to stop him--to stop the whole Council, if that proved necessary, since Wesley had believed, at the time, that his father was acting with the Council's backing--no matter what the cost. 

He hadn't thought about it consciously, not at the time, but now that he did, he wasn't even surprised. 

"You know, if you want me to leave, you could just say so, instead of staring at me like that," Angel said, breaking into his thoughts. 

Wesley blinked. He hadn't even realized he'd been watching Angel that intensely; he'd been caught up inside his own head, and not paying attention to his surroundings. "No," he said. Then, a bit louder, "I don't want you to leave." He might have said more than that; there were more things he _could_ have said, at least, but not now. Not after Angel had decided, over and again, that Wesley was a traitor. The words had been said and the deeds had been done and Wesley wasn't naïve enough to think they could ever truly be taken back. 

He'd been that naïve once. He'd believed in Good and Evil and in the non-existence of shades of grey, and then he'd been fired from the Council, and fallen in love with a vampire; from that point on, it seemed that the entire world had been painted in grey. 

"I'm not going anywhere, Wes," Angel said, softly, and Wesley wondered how pathetically needy he'd sounded. 

"Of course not," he said, perhaps a bit more sharply than he'd intended. "It's easier to keep an eye on me this way, just in case I fail again--in case I decide to betray you again."

Angel didn't respond at first, and when he did, it was slowly, as though he had to choose each word with care. "It's--things are… they're complicated," he said, finally. "Really, unbelievably, complicated. But… like I said before. I get you now. Or at least, I get why you thought you had to…." He stopped, frowning, and the next words seemed even more deliberate. "I mean, why you do some of the things you do."

He looked at Angel skeptically. He was reasonably certain that Angel was telling the truth, but understanding didn't automatically imply acceptance. He wouldn't say forgiveness; he wouldn't apologize for things he didn't regret having done. He regretted their outcome, but no matter what a wedge they'd driven between him and Angel, he didn't regret his decisions. 

"I never got it before. And so I want to… put things right," Angel continued. "To start, anyway. That's why I came here tonight. Because a lot of things are complicated, but this isn't."

"Isn't it?" Wesley asked, quietly. That seemed highly unlikely to him; _everything_ was complicated, except that moment on the roof when he'd pulled his gun and fired.

Angel hesitated. "Okay, I'm not saying I-- I don't always like what you do," he admitted. Wesley could hear in his voice just how much of an understatement that was, and ached, just a little, because Angel seemed to have lost his faith in a great deal more than just Wesley. "And a lot of it's complicated. More complicated than I can even start to explain. But this part doesn't have to be."

He couldn't do this. He'd already lost Angel once. He couldn't do it again, and it _would_ happen; he knew that. It always did. But he was so tired, and he wanted to hear something other than gunfire, other than his father's voice telling him that he'd failed again, he'd let a threat get close to the people he cared about. "Which part would that be?"

"The part where you come here." 

He looked up at Angel. "I'm not entirely certain I've enough energy to move that far."

"Okay, then the part where I go over there." He waited for Wesley to nod slightly before moving over to Wesley's end of the couch. 

"You're right. That was remarkably uncomplicated," he said. 

"Yeah. And so's this next part, which is where you go to sleep and we deal with everything else--everything that we _can_ deal with, anyway--in eight hours or so." 

"Angel--" 

Angel shook his head. "It can wait, Wes. I'm not going anywhere."

"You said that before."

"Just making sure you know I mean it." He hesitated, but then stretched an arm out along the back of the couch. "Is this okay?"

"Of course." It wasn't; it would have been far more reassuring if Angel had been willing to touch him, but Wesley wasn't about to ask for that. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to lean back--or to the side, either. He could sleep like this. 

"We're on the same page about what this is, right?" Angel said after a moment. 

"Hm?"

"This. You. Me. The couch. Me sitting here holding onto you while you sleep. Because if we're not, I'm going to make a big idiot of myself at some point pretty soon, and I'd rather get it over with now when Spike's not around." 

"What is it, then?" he asked, and that was when Angel's arm settled on his shoulders, pulling him close. 

"This," he said, dropping a light, rather chaste kiss on Wesley's lips. 

"And you're saying this isn't complicated?"

"Everything's complicated," Angel finally admitted. "But this could possibly be the kind of complicated that doesn't involve Spike beating me up to get to a cup of flat Mountain Dew--it's a long story, never mind, I'll tell you tomorrow." 

He'd thought things had been destroyed between them; he'd never considered the possibility that they could be repaired. That Angel might be willing to try to repair them. "Tomorrow," he agreed, "or I'll get the details from Spike, and I'm sure you'd rather I hear your version."

"You mean the real version?"

"Something like that," he said, with a faint smile.

He considered, for a moment, suggesting that they move to his bedroom, where they'd probably both be more comfortable. Then he rejected the idea, not wanting to disturb things, half-afraid that he'd break the illusion and be alone with his thoughts once more. 

Instead, Wesley closed his eyes, and instead of his father's body falling to the rooftop, saw only darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
